Collaborative document authoring is now more a norm than an exception in any line of business, be it technology, law, education, research or journalism. Typically, several individuals author different sections of a document based on their assigned roles and their individual area of expertise. A coordinator then merges the sections together and is responsible for the document as a whole, including overseeing the authorship of each part of the document. The coordinator's role involves a significant amount of effort in terms of tracking different versions of each section by each author, and merging the different versions of document sections into the master document.
To further complicate the process of coordinating a collaboratively authored document, there are various media and applications used in the writing process. The actual content intended for the final product often comprises different mediums or formats than that of the master document. Coordinators must capture content from each medium and format and merge the content into the master document. Because of the complex nature of collaborative document authorship, the coordinator responsible for merging the document must spend significant time and effort to track different versions of the documents received from the individual authors. Furthermore, the coordinator must exert considerable effort to carefully extract specific sections written by the appropriate authors from the correct version each document, for inclusion in the master document. There is a need for a single visual environment for efficiently creating a master document by tracking, organizing, and combining compartmentalized information from diverse sources and formats.